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Prickly Questions

I was listening to a TV discussion of sexuality the other night when one of those women comedians with a sharp line in anti-man routines said, "The trouble with men is that they can't control their penises", which was maybe the hundredth time I'd heard the same point made by the same sort of person but the first time it ever occurred to me that, as a matter of fact, it's true.

Eamonn McCann, 01 Feb 2001

I was listening to a TV discussion of sexuality the other night when one of those women comedians with a sharp line in anti-man routines said, "The trouble with men is that they can't control their penises", which was maybe the hundredth time I'd heard the same point made by the same sort of person but the first time it ever occurred to me that, as a matter of fact, it's true.

Men can wiggle their toes. Try it. Send a message

from your mind to your toes to wiggle and they will.

Say to your fingers to drum out a tattoo on the table

and they'll go thrumm-thrumm. Nod your head, blink, wink, purse lips, waggle your elbows, eyebrows, in,

out, in, out, shake it all about. All and any of the other fleshy appendages of the body will respond to an instruction to move it. Some chaps I know can even flutter their ear-lobes to hip-hop rhythms late at night in Sandino's when Kwa is on sounds.

But you can't command the penis to stand up. You can take it in hand, contrive conducive circumstances, focus your mind on facilitative imagery, and probably, eventually, soon or late, it'll rise. But you won't make it happen just by saying it should. The penis is the appendage that men can't control.

Wherein lies the significance?, I ask myself. There must - mustn't there? - be an evolutionary purpose to this state of non-affairs. Why are the feature pages of our broadsheet newspapers filled with puffery on the putative mysteries of the female arts and parts but contain nothing at all to elucidate the paradoxical enigma of the unbiddable prick?

What does it all mean? Is this yet another example of the implacable refusal of the feminised junta to acknowledge the vulnerability of men? Was that woman on television not so much jibing at our dominance as gloating at our helplessness? Is there to be no end to the unspoken oppression under which millions of males have screamed silently for aeons?

I have to confess I don't know the answer to any of these questions. But I bet Rich Zubady does.

Eamonn McCann

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